Fantasy football: The ideal mock draft for the 2019 NFL season
By Chris Wilson
Fantasy football draft season is hitting full swing, with only three weekends remaining before the 2019 NFL season begins. Your upcoming fantasy draft won’t go perfectly according to plan, but if it did, it would look a lot like this.
2019 fantasy football draft season is here, and you have some work to do.
If you’re playing fantasy football this year, you have a draft — or drafts — scheduled over the next three weeks.
Perhaps you’ve listened to all your favorite offseason podcasts, stayed up-to-date with the latest injury news and reviewed scores of fantasy football articles and projections — paying particular attention to FanSided’s experts. Or maybe you’re just starting to cram for tomorrow’s draft, and this is the very first thing you’ve read.
Either way, one thing is for certain: No matter how much you prepare, no fantasy football draft goes perfectly according to plan.
In order to be flexible on draft day, you need to put in the time to gain the knowledge necessary to build a winning draft strategy. And you’re really going to need that knowledge when you’re inevitably forced to deviate from your original game plan.
If you had the insight to wait until the 10th round to draft Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, you probably did pretty well in 2018. In fact, over a third of fantasy football champions had Mahomes in their winning lineup last year.
In 2017, Los Angeles Rams running back Todd Gurley was the third-round steal who propelled over a third of fantasy owners to championship glory. But those who rode Gurley into the fantasy playoffs in 2018 infrequently retained their league trophy after the running back fizzled out due to injury at the end of the season.
If you had a perfect draft in 2017, your Gurley-led 2018 squad was less than ideal, likely netting you the runner-up second pick in this year’s draft. Today, we’ll get you back on track as we embark on the perfect 2019 fantasy football draft from the No. 2 slot.
Keeping the “fantasy” in fantasy football, none of our targets will get sniped in today’s mock draft, and every player will go where he’s supposed to — within a couple of picks — per Fantasy Football Calculator’s current Average Draft Position (ADP) for 12-team “Half-PPR” fantasy football leagues.
We kick off our 2019 ideal fantasy draft with a league-winning running back from 2018: